American English: the new lingua franca

My e-mailbag has contained a lively correspondence, following my comments last month about English spelling and what might (or might not) constitute legitimate alternatives. There seems widespread agreement that, in spelling and grammar, American influence is steadily growing and a general acceptance that, given the dynamics involved, it is pretty futile to try to stop the trend.

From a previous life working in Fleet Street I remember how we all held out, years after sensible people had accepted the inevitable, for the English billion as against the invading American upstart. Taking up inordinate headline space, we would insist that the amount the UK was borrowing from the International Monetary Fund was '£5,000m' (or whatever), rather than just '£5b'. It was the Financial Times that cracked first, recognising that the adjustment was sensible in the light of continuing high inflation and the usage of most of its international business readership. The rest of us all followed suit within a year or two.

The pace of the American linguistic invasion has accelerated exponentially in the last fifteen years, not least because so many of the dictionaries and spellchecks available online are American based. Also, more and more important academic textbooks use American spelling. I am indebted to my former colleague Wynford Hicks, author of 'English for Journalists' (now in its fourth edition), for the tale of a British author whose Chrome spellcheck blocked all his attempts to type the word 'furore', changing it always to 'furor'. Wynford's view, also, is that the British distinction between licence or license, or practice and practise, for example, is rapidly getting lost, even in 'educated' circles. Equally, there was once a tendency to regard words ending in -ize to be American, with the -ise ending being seen as more English. The major British newspapers use -ise (the Times held out for -ize until 1992 before switching), but -ize endings are regularly the norm for British book publishers. One sometimes half longs for the authoritarian approach to grammar and spelling of the Académie Française with its world-wide war in defence of the French language, but we know that it isn't winning!
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I get regular requests that the names of the setters of the Quick puzzles should be made known, as those of the Cryptics are. The reason that they aren't, beyond the feeble one that they never have been, is that the Quicks are much more heavily edited than the Cryptics. When a clue in a Cryptic puzzle is modified (generally for reasons of taste, decency, accuracy or political correctness), the editing process involves full consultation, leading (sometimes after full and frank exchanges) to agreement between setter and editor. With the Quicks the editing process of a particular puzzle is often so extensive that its character is significantly changed. T, D, A and PC may also be involved here but by far the most dominant reason is to remove duplication of a recent solution or clue, which can involve changing a whole corner of a grid.

The puzzles are set in rotation in batches of 18 puzzles (three weeks' worth) by three setters and, while they (usually) remember solutions that they have included in their last few batches, they do not have in their minds ones that have been used by their two colleagues. At one time Araucaria set all of the Quicks. When I took over editing in 1997 there was a team of three: Araucaria, Rufus and the late Mercury. The present trio is Paul, Chifonie and Orlando.

At the risk of being told I am failing by some Quickster with a good memory, my aim it to avoid an 'ordinary' word or phrase appearing as a solution more frequently than once in three months and a striking one (eg 'shopaholic' or 'daddy-long-legs') more than once in nine months.
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Advance warning: the August Bank Holiday special offering will be published on Saturday 24 August. It is a double-grid alphabetical jigsaw puzzle, which should keep you occupied for at least some of the long weekend. It is by a new setter, Maskarade, as Araucaria has this time been unable to set it because of illness.
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You seem to have found the July Genius puzzle (No 121 by Crucible) harder than average, as there were only 122 entries by the deadline (of which nine on the first day). Congratulations to Tony Sever, from Ealing, London, who is the July winner.
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• This article was amended on the 7 August 2013 to correct mistake in the spelling of the word "license".